The Rivalry (2 page)

“If St. Joe’s pulls this out, Jay will never hear the end of it,” Dick Jerardi, sitting to Stevie’s left, was saying, leaning close so Stevie could hear him. “They could go on and
win the Big East, and all the Villanova fans are going to say is, ‘But you lost to St. Joe’s.’ ”

Stevie laughed. He knew the longtime
Philadelphia Daily News
reporter was right. As successful as Jay Wright had been during his coaching tenure at Villanova—including a run to the Final Four in 2009—his school’s fans found any loss to another Big Five school—St. Joseph’s, La Salle, Temple, or Pennsylvania—completely unacceptable.

Stevie noticed the St. Joseph’s Hawk mascot standing on the edge of the huddle, flapping his wings as always. St. Joseph’s motto was “The Hawk will never die,” and the student wearing the costume was required to keep his arms flapping at all times throughout a game. Given the difficulty of that task, Stevie hadn’t been surprised to learn that whoever was selected as the mascot received a full scholarship for that year.

Even though he really liked Jay Wright and Villanova, Stevie was rooting for St. Joseph’s to pull off an upset. For one thing, a win would mean more to the Hawks, who were unranked starting the new season. And he liked Phil Martelli’s everyman approach to coaching. Wright was just so smooth—known as one of the best-dressed coaches in the country. Jerardi had told him that Wright wore cologne
during
games.

TV finally came back from commercial and St. Joe’s inbounded. The ball swung to point guard Tommy Jones and he slowly dribbled the clock down. “Oh God,” Jerardi murmured. “They’re going for the win right now.”

The clock ticked under ten seconds. Jones began to approach the key. Out of the corner of his eye, Stevie saw St. Joe’s best shooter, Michael Anthony, cutting from the left baseline to the right, getting a screen to prevent his defender from following. Stevie knew what was coming next.

Sure enough, as Jones spun into the lane, Anthony popped out on the right side of the key. Jones got him the ball as the Villanova defenders scrambled. Stevie could see the clock … three … two …

Anthony caught the ball with the clock at two seconds and took one quick dribble to square himself and clear some space. He was just outside the three-point line when he released the shot, and the buzzer sounded with the ball in the air.

Swish.

The St. Joseph’s fans exploded! Anthony disappeared under a pile of teammates. The coaches met right in front of where Stevie was sitting to shake hands.

“Gutsy call,” Wright said, an arm around Martelli’s shoulders.

“I got lucky,” Martelli shouted back.

Stevie double-checked the scoreboard: St. Joseph’s 68–Villanova 67.

Martelli was right. He was lucky. He would have been second-guessed for days—maybe years in Philly—if the do-or-die shot hadn’t fallen.

But Stevie was luckier still. It was an amazing game, and he got to write about it and tell the tale.

*   *   *

Stevie was also lucky that the Villanova–St. Joseph’s game was played on a Friday night. He wasn’t allowed to cover games on school nights, his parents being a lot more concerned with how he was doing as a high school freshman than his budding career as a sportswriter.

Stevie had almost fallen into it, winning a writing contest when he was thirteen that allowed him to go to the Final Four. There he and Susan Carol, the other contest winner, had stumbled into a plot to fix the national championship game. Thanks to the fact that they had broken that story, the two of them had been asked to cover other events.

Now Stevie wrote for the
Washington Herald
whenever he could, and Susan Carol wrote for the
Washington Post
. And he’d found a girlfriend as well as a job. Even though they had endured some seriously rocky moments, Stevie and Susan Carol were going out—well, as much as you could when one person lived in Philadelphia and the other lived in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

As Stevie made his way through the celebrating St. Joseph’s fans to the interview room that was underneath the stands, he noticed he had a text message on his phone from Bobby Kelleher:
Call as soon as u can. Great game
.

Stevie figured it would be at least ten minutes before any players or coaches came in to talk to the media, so he found a corner where his phone got service and dialed Kelleher’s number.

“Man, Phil took a hell of a chance playing for one shot,” Kelleher said, answering the call.

“Where are you?” Stevie asked, because it sounded almost as loud on Kelleher’s end as on his.

“I’m in a sports bar down the street from the Penn State campus,” Kelleher said. “I watched the game with Hoops. It absolutely killed him not being there.”

Stevie smiled. Hoops was Dick Weiss, a columnist for the
New York Daily News
. Weiss was a born-and-bred Philadelphian who had grown up watching games in the Palestra. Even though he worked for a New York paper, he still lived in Philadelphia and would always be a Philly guy at heart.

But Kelleher and Weiss were both covering the Penn State–Ohio State football game the next day, which had a noon kickoff, so they had to settle for watching the basketball game on TV.

“Hey, Hoops wants to say hi,” Kelleher said.

A moment later, Weiss was on the phone. Even over the noise, his Philadelphia accent was distinctive. “You have to ask Phil what he was doing on the last play, okai?” he said. “He was vurry, vurry lucky that shot went down.”

Stevie agreed, and they made plans to see a game in December when the regular football season was over and Weiss had some free time. Then Kelleher came back on the line.

“Anyway, you think you can take the train down to Washington on Sunday?” he said. “You can tell your
folks you’ll be there and back in a few hours.” Reading Stevie’s mind, he added, “You can do your homework on the train.”

“I’ll ask,” Stevie said. “What do you need, a Redskins sidebar or something?”

“Hardly. I wouldn’t do that to you. No, we’re having a big planning meeting over at the
Post
. Army-Navy will be in DC in a couple weeks and the two papers are combining coverage and going all out. First time the game’s ever been played in DC, and it may be the last. Both papers want you and Susan Carol involved.”

“Is Susan Carol going to be there Sunday?” Stevie asked.

He heard Kelleher laugh. “Yes, Stevie, I figured that’d get you here. Typical her: she’s managed to get an interview with Orrin Hatch on Monday to talk about his legislation to ban the BCS. She’s going to stay with us Sunday night.”

Stevie shook his head. That
was
typical Susan Carol. She was always one step ahead.

“When did you call her?” Stevie wondered.

“This afternoon. Don’t ask me how she got the interview set up so fast, because I haven’t a clue. Talk to your parents. You’ve probably got a short school week coming up with Thanksgiving, and you won’t miss more than a day or two of school to cover the game. You’ve pulled it off in the past.”

Barely, Stevie thought. Still, especially with Susan Carol involved, the Army-Navy game sounded like fun.
He heard someone call his name and saw Dick Jerardi waving him in the direction of the interview room.

“Martelli’s coming in,” he said. “Gotta go.”

“Call me in the morning,” Kelleher said. “I’ll be up early fighting traffic to get to the stadium.” Stevie rolled his eyes. After sports, Bobby’s biggest obsessions were traffic and parking.

Stevie hustled into the interview room just as Martelli was talking about the last shot.

“I think I probably lost my mind during the time-out with twenty-five seconds left,” he said. “I know, it’s crazy playing for one shot there. But something in my gut just told me this was the way to go. Fortunately, Anthony made me look like a good coach by making the shot.”

Stevie scribbled furiously in his notebook. That took care of Weiss’s question. Now all he had to do was convince his parents to let him take the train to Washington on Sunday.

S
tevie waited until breakfast the next morning to bring up the Washington trip to his parents. He knew his mother would need convincing, and he had been too tired when he got home from the game to start a debate.

“How much homework do you have this weekend?” his mom asked, a predictable and reasonable first question.

“Not much,” Stevie lied.

His father looked at him sharply. “I thought you told me you had a paper due on
Beowulf
, but you’d pass on watching the football games today to get it done,” he said.

“Well, I can still do that,” Stevie answered. “And I can do the rest on the train.”

His parents looked at one another. Christine Thomas shrugged helplessly. “I know you’re going to let him do it, Bill,” she said. “You always do.”

“It’s not as if he’s flunking out of school,” Bill Thomas said. “He’s making solid B’s.”

“Which these days might get him into a solid B-grade college—but not anyplace that’s any good,” she said.

“Mom, not everyone needs to go to an Ivy League school,” Stevie said. His dad had gone to Penn and his mother to Columbia. They had met in law school at Yale.

“All he’s done with journalism will help him a lot, Chris,” Bill Thomas said. “Plus, can we worry about college when he’s, I don’t know, a junior?”

“Okay, okay, I know when I’m outnumbered,” she said. “Stevie, I want to
see
the
Beowulf
paper before you get on that train.”

“You got it, Mom.” He raced off to call Kelleher before she could change her mind.

By ten the next morning, he was on a train out of 30th Street station. He had only written half the
Beowulf
paper, but the fact that it was actually pretty good rescued him. “Come home with the paper unfinished and you won’t get to work on this project,” his mother had said.

He quickly read the sports section of the
New York Times
—having read the
Philadelphia Inquirer
at home—and then dug into his math and Spanish homework. The trip to Union Station in Washington took a little under two hours, and he was just about finished when it arrived. That left
Beowulf
to finish on the ride home.

He had been in Union Station before, so he knew exactly how to work his way from the tracks through the massive building to the front door that led to the cab line. It was a cold but sunny November day, and he could see the enormous white dome of the Capitol building shining in the distance—impressive.

He got a cab to the
Washington Post
offices, as Kelleher had instructed. When Stevie had called the day before to say he could come, Bobby had explained the details of the project to him.

“We started combining some coverage with the
Post
about a year ago,” he said. “The point is to save money, really. Instead of both papers sending people to cover a mid-May road game for the Nationals in Chicago, one reporter goes and files for both papers. If someone writes a day story on how Maryland is getting ready to play Wake Forest in football, both papers may use it.

“This is different, though. We both want to do blow-out coverage of Army-Navy because it’s never been in DC before and because both teams are good this year. We got lucky with that. But we don’t have as much staff as we used to before the economy slammed us and both papers had buyouts. A lot of talent walked out the doors. So the editors decided we’d work together. Which means we can team you and Susan Carol.”

Stevie certainly liked that idea. She was the prettiest girl he’d ever met, scary smart, and she knew more about sports than he did—which could actually be a little annoying, if Stevie was honest.

Still, she kept him on his toes, and there was nothing more fun than hanging out with her at a major event—even if they did seem to get into trouble most of the time.

His father had once likened them to Pigpen, a character in the old “Peanuts” comic strip who went around in a swirl of dust and dirt. “That’s you and Susan Carol when it comes to trouble,” he had said. “It just follows you wherever you go.”

The cab ride only took about ten minutes, and when he arrived at the
Post
, Stevie called Matt Rennie. Rennie had been Kelleher’s editor at the
Washington Herald
but had moved to the
Post
when he had been offered the number-two job on the
Post
’s sports staff.

“Steve, glad you could make it,” Rennie said. “I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

Rennie walked him through security and then brought him up to the newsroom on the fifth floor.

“You’re the first one here,” Rennie said. “Bobby, Tamara, and Susan Carol are on their way in from Potomac. If you want, I’ll give you a quick tour.”

Stevie loved that idea. He had recently read
All the President’s Men
, the book written by
Post
reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the fall of President Richard Nixon, much of it stemming from reporting they had done after the infamous 1972 break-in at the Watergate Hotel office building. He had been fascinated by the story of how Woodward and Bernstein slowly pieced the
story together, beginning on the day after the break-in, when it had appeared to be little more than a routine burglary attempt.

He knew the newspaper business had changed a lot since then, but just being in the
Post
newsroom gave him a thrill. It was massive—and oddly quiet.

“Not a lot of people in this early,” Rennie said. “The dot-com people are here, and a few editors and reporters, but Sundays are normally like this. I think Woodward’s in, though. Bobby told me you wanted to meet him.”

“Bob Woodward’s here?”

“He was on
Meet the Press
this morning. He sometimes swings by for a little while on Sundays just because it’s so quiet.”

They were walking between desks toward the back of the newsroom and Stevie was getting a little nervous. He’d met a lot of famous athletes and coaches, but Bob Woodward was the epitome of what Stevie hoped to someday be. He knew he’d never be an NFL quarterback or an NBA point guard. A top-flight journalist? Maybe.